Epiphany

Omg. I just had a light buld moment (literally, I think I might be powering the lamp right now). I study cognitive psychology, but I don't actually *believe* in cognitive psychology. I study low-level cognition: attention, memory, learning, perceptual processing... the detection of simply lights and sounds...

Psychology has gone through several major revolutions in its history. In it's most recent incarnation, psychology really started with Freud - but that was a bunch of non-sense. Or at least it was unscientific and completely untestable. You can't falsify something you can't prove to begin with. For example, try falsifying that we went to the moon. Just kidding. Try falsifying that someone's death is all part of God's Plan. Anyhoo, at some point psycholgy really began to be about predicting behavior, and so enter the behaviorists. There is no mind, there is only behavior. Stimulus and behavior, to be exact. We can't see the 'mind', so let's not make up fairy-tales. And then, the cognitive revolution happened. You can't talk about human behavior without talking about the mind! Cognitive psychology... no longer are we only permitted to talk about stimulus and behavior, now we can talk about the organism. What is going on in the mind of the organism. This era birthed black box psychology - stimulus goes into a black box, which does something with the information, and spits out the appropriate response.

I still think this is true. I think there is alot of psychology that requires us to postulate a mind. There is something greater that the sum of a bunch of brain cells and neurotransmitters (let's call it superadditivity to be scientific about it). But I don't think that's the kind of thing I study. It's why I'm interested in the brain, and not the mind.

I think I've been trying to work that out for 4 years. This will help. I've been Indecision-City for months, but this will help.